Monthly Archives: November 2014

In the course of a long life there comes a time when a lot of stuff at last, belatedly, decisively falls away no matter how much we try to keep it. Then we think, ‘well that wasn’t so bad after all…I feel freer.’ But what remains is not necessarily a free person. No, the worst stuff clings like a second skin, a suffocating armour. For me it has been mostly the glove or gauntlet – the apologetic sidetracking prevaricating moderating mediator between my creative powers and a world I have always expected to reject what my unfettered hand would create. Now I plan to throw down that silver glove which was meant to armour me all these years against the slings and arrows of the ordinary world and ordinary people, the bourgeoisie, that is, the sheepish, judgmental hordes who follow the safest leaders of the spirit of the age. They didn’t like my watered-down offerings anyway. Or me.

Now, with Nietzsche, as a creative spirit unbound from the world, inured, made indifferent to rejection by long years of the world’s indifference, I have come down to a simple fear-free, joyful will to ‘press my hand upon millennia as upon wax.’ Direct. Honest. No gauntlet to soften or simplify or protect me from the true contact with whatever rock I intend to mould. Perhaps now, at sixty, I have become an artist. As the Mask says, ‘Somebody, stop me!’ 🙂

So, after the nice dove, what? Watch this space! Something to rise up heroic, noble, uncompromisingly my creation, perhaps in the courtyard behind the head of the dove. Of course, the dove for me is of Aphrodite and represents passion, eros, desire to create. That it returns to the Ark is proof that the Ark is an Archetype of new creation, out of the floods of loss and death, to a new day. It comes to rest on a craggy mountain, and the rainbow appears – a rainbow of unlimited possibility as the voyagers come down from the mountain to inhabit the new world…

Well actually she is vigilant. Times are troubled. It was good to get the white limelock sealer on and paint the eyes and beak, see her come alive… And to sit inside her head and rest awhile. And to carve the spiral and bird and sunflower at the ends of the wall. Also the sign under her beak – ferrocement works well for signs too – won’t rot, is cheaper than signboard and very strong…

Names that have been mooted to go on the sign: The Flying Ark; Dove’s Rest, Be Here Now…

The archetypal power of the dove and ark are there, but they are non-threatening and friendly, and lots of people – even locals! – have approved by thumbs up or toots as they passed, or by actually stopping. A little boy and his dad yesterday had a look in the head too, and the boy climbed up and heard the echo..

now, of course, the Ark needs repainted. Maybe white with green or blue trim… Then the front rooms to be converted to retail space for Jenny’s fashion and my jewellery, and maybe other things too…